About

Words have meaning. As catalogers and people who work with metadata, we use words to categorize and organize and describe our collections. We want people to find things. We want researchers to discover that item that will help answer questions, point in the right direction, or show a new path. The words we apply matter. The words we apply also have historical, social, and political significance. The words we use reflect how we understand the world in our time. When we use words to categorize and organize and describe people, groups, and countries, we are reflecting who we are and how we view the world. Our work requires that we strive to recognize and counter those biases to make our collections as useful as possible to the widest audience possible.

Join us for a discussion about the words we use in our metadata work. We’ll review authorized sources, subscription sources, and our own records to reflect on how we apply words to categorize and organize and describe people, groups, and countries. We’ll identify the processes that exist to make changes to those words and examine whether we are serving the world we think we are serving.

Words feel very careless out in the world today. It seems that anyone can say anything about anything, which is an unofficial slogan of the Semantic Web and the original reason for the openness of the Resource Description Framework[1]. Facts, information that is supposed to be indisputable and a matter of objective reality, are in constant competition with interpretation. When applying metadata to our collections, we are categorizing, organizing, and describing. Does this mean we are only working in facts? How does this impact the way people search and discover our collections? Should we only be factual or is there a use for interpretation in metadata? What does it mean to be factual when describing archival and special collections?

Join us for a conversation about facts in metadata. Bring and share your examples of how the line between fact and interpretation blurs in your work.

Illegal aliens. Sexual minorities. Ableism. In the attempt to describe an entire universe of things and ideas, librarians design thesauri, knowledge classification schemes, and metadata standards to help people find information. Because these knowledge organization schemes codify what can and cannot be said about a library resource or author, one would hope that these knowledge schemes err on the side of inclusivity and are transparent about inherent historical and cultural biases. Alas, mistakes have been made. How can we do better?

Join the next Metadata Discussion Group meeting, where we’ll welcoming in the new academic year with a discussion about the many possible paths to implementing linked library data. Participants will consider homegrown and vended solutions and think about the implications of when and where to introduce linked data into library data stream.